Wednesday, January 28, 2015

I met Rodolfo for the first time at the SCBWI-LA Summer
Conference a few years ago – I’d been hearing about this talented illustrator, and
there was all this chatter . . . so I was curious – Who is this guy? He must be really full of himself. (Kidding) Soon
after meeting him, we joined up in an illustrating critique group, so I got to
know him pretty well over the weeks of Google Hangouts. Of course, he’s the
most laidback guy you’ll ever meet. During our meetings, I got to see lots of
his sketches and artwork for THE AMAZING WILMER DOOLEY (the sequel to THE
CONTAGIOUS COLORS OF MUMPLY MIDDLE SCHOOL, which he also illustrated).

It’s fun seeing his career progress and cheering him along.
It just keeps getting better and better! His first picture book, DEAR DRAGON,
(written by Josh Funk), will be published Viking in 2016.

I can’t go into too many specifics here, so I will merely allude to things.

Today, I updated my online portfolio, if you want to know what I'm working on NOW now. ;)

I recently signed with my agent, Lara Perkins at Andrea
Brown Literary Agency, and have been hard at work preparing book dummies for
submission to editors. It is a LONG process.

Besides things I can’t get too specific about (as I mentioned above), I
have two new projects I’m developing, as well as two book dummies that need
revisions. I’ve also got drafts of a YA and a MG novel that are burning holes
in my hard drive.

Right now, the key is to focus on revising and making my
work stronger, rather than getting lured away by “The Shiny New Idea.” One of
the benefits of having an agent that I didn’t anticipate is that she can help
me figure out which projects to focus on and in which order. After all, there’s
something to be said for following one’s muse, but it’s certainly nice to have
an external guiding voice.

How does my work
differ from others of its genre?

I developed my current kidlit illustration style over the
course of about 5 years, though it’s still a work in progress. ;)

I’d estimate that 90% of the physical labor is done using
Photoshop. But that doesn’t mean anything is automated and easy to produce. Even
though everything after the pencil sketch is done on the computer, I’m still
hand drawing almost every line, and hand painting almost every splash of color.
I use the computer because it gives me the ability to undo mistakes, and still
capture that freedom of a quickly drawn line (even if it takes me 50 times to
get the line to look just right).

All told, a full color double page spread takes me about 30
hours of solid work to complete.

Why do I write what I
do?

For picture books, I write what makes me laugh, but always
try to instill a little bit of myself or someone I know into the main
character.

For stories for older children, I start to write about
issues that troubled me at that age – they are the seed at the core of the
story, and the story itself is very different from anything I have experienced.
It’s a fun challenge to come up with a fresh story that can involve some of the
somewhat pedestrian challenges I faced. After I start with that seed, I
definitely adjust as needed to service the story, and occasionally, that seed
is entirely cut out of the book. But by then, I’m invested in telling a good
story, so I don’t mind at all. I need to start somewhere, and the best place to
start for me is from my own experience.

I think as I gain more experience writing, I might be able
to find a different starting-off point, but I want to be more confident that I
can pull it off when I do.

I met Ken Min for the first time at an SCBWI-LA Summer
Conference. He was wearing a fake plastic moustache strapped over his upper
lip, and I was convinced he had had surgery or a cleft lip or something and
that was his cool way of covering it up. Every time I saw him after that, I
made sure to make moustache references. When his illustrations for HOT, HOT
ROTI FOR DADA-JI won the Picture Book Honor Award for
Literature from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA),
I was down in Anaheim when he gave his acceptance speech and he played it
totally cool as a cucumber. His style is so unique and different from my own.
It’s fun to try and stretch my mind around his illustrating methodology.

But unlike last time, this time around I didn't delusionally track the stats. After all, as of the last time I checked, there were over 25,000 SEPARATE entries into the Creators' Stickers category. Unless I could manage to be featured, it was certain obscurity for the Beavs...which again leads me to the comparison to self-publishing a book. Even if you've got a quality product, how are people going to find you if you're one unit of an anonymous horde?

And again, all the self-promotion I could possibly muster at this point in my career probably wouldn't do a thing, as it doesn't seem that LINE is being adopted in the US like it is everywhere else in the world, and my reach is primarily in the US. How to extend my reach? I don't know. But in the meantime, I can't get most of my friends to even open the LINE app anymore because it sends push notifications so frequently. Maybe users elsewhere are more tolerant of them or even excited to read about the constantly updated features, but not them.

Anyway, for what it's worth, as shown back in June, here's the product of a month of my life:

Maybe I sound a little bitter. I shouldn't be. It wasn't a waste of time. I made sure it wouldn't be, by rationalizing the work in two ways before endeavoring on it. After all, it was through this process that I managed to create the dummy that landed me my literary agent! So what if I'm not making boffo bucks in Japan? That has never been my life's mission. So I am officially shrugging off any negativity about it! *SHRUG*

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Last year,
I missed the opportunity to participate in #Inktober, so I created my own month
of drawing: Drawing a Day December (#DrADaDec). And I made a lot of drawings
that I’m proud of. But I’d never challenged myself by restricting my art to one
medium. Inktober’s got it in its name: you’ve got to use ink. I certainly
didn’t feel confident without an eraser or Control-Z, so I thought this would
be a good way to force myself to nail it on the first try. And this year, I
managed to remember to start drawing on October 1st:

#Inktober Day 1: this porcupine hobo is ready to ride the rails!

This
character was so well-liked that after a few days I returned to him, and before
I knew it, started telling a story about him, one installment per day. These
story installments aren’t compiled into one tidy document anywhere else, so I
supposed this is the place to make it so.

Now again,
because there was no eraser, and I didn’t crumple up any drawings and start on
a new one for the day, there are a number of flubs and technical mistakes in
there. Also, I didn’t plot the story ahead of time, I made it up as I went
along. And with all those excuses (heh), here is the rest of The Saga of Porcupine Hobo:

#inktober day 5: hobo porcupine enjoys a feast!

#inktober day 6: Porcupine Hobo stows away.

#Inktober Day 7: Porcupine Hobo meets Bun-Bun the Tramp.

#Inktober day 8: our stowaways are discovered.

#Inktober
Day 9: After the Bull throws them out,

and they plunge down, down, down
into the river,

Porcupine Hobo's and Bun-Bun the Tramp's lives flash
before their eyes...

#inktober day 10: FLASHBACK! Part 1 of Bun-Bun the Tramp's Origin Story:

As Bun-Bun's life flashes before his eyes, he recalls his humble beginnings as a pumpkin farmer.

#Inktober
Day 11: Flashback Part 2 of Bun-Bun the Tramp's Origin Story:

Tail between his legs, Bun-Bun had to admit
defeat against The Great Dustbowl.

He was not a dust bunny, after all.

#Inktober Day 12: Flashback Part 3 of Bun-Bun the Tramp's Origin Story:

Bun-Bun abandons his dust plot and sets off into the unknown to seek his fortune.

#Inktober
Day 13: Flashback Part 4 of Bun-Bun the Tramp's Origin Story:

Bun-Bun meets Cubby the Drifter, a roller skating bear who escaped
the circus.

Cubby teaches Bun-Bun everything he knows about Hobo
Living,

then gives Bun-Bun his hat, and goes to retire in a cave.

Bun-Bun The Tramp is born.

#Inktober
Day 14: Bun-Bun the Tramp and Porcupine Hobo

fish themselves out of the
river and find themselves on a small island.

As they while away the
hours and recover

from their rude awakening, they exchange life stories.

#Inktober
Day 15: FLASHBACK! Part 1 of Porcupine Hobo's Origin Story:

Porcupine Hobo recounts his not-so-humble beginnings

in a 5th Avenue estate, silver spoon firmly lodged in mouth...

#Inktober
Day 16: Flashback Part 2 of Porcupine Hobo's Origin Story:

The prodigal
son departs for his Ivy League studies...or so his parents think.

#Inktober
Day 17: Flashback part 3 of Porcupine Hobo's Origin Story:

Porcupine DID
fritter away a certain stretch of his stint in academia

grooving in one
long dance party. But it was not to last.

#Inktober
Day 18: Flashback pt 4 of Porcupine Hobo's Origin Story:

After one
particularly rough night, our hero awoke to find a hollowness in his
heart.

He knew nothing. He was a shell of a porcupine.

Something had to
change.

#inktober
day 19: Flashback Part 5 of Porcupine Hobo's Origin Story:

If the
porcupine was going to REALLY learn about the world,

he was going to
have to take matters into his own paws. That very afternoon,

he walked
through the wrought iron gates of his school, never to look back.

Porcupine Hobo was born.

#Inktober
Day 20: While Porcupine Hobo recounts his origins,

Bun-Bun the Tramp
uses his Advanced Hobo-ing skills

to build the duo a shelter and start a
fire while they await rescue.

They while away the time, hollow-bellied
but warm.

#Inktober
day 21: Porcupine Hobo wanted to make the swim

across the river, or at
least try to build a raft, but Bun-Bun the Tramp

refused to leave, and
Porcupine Hobo couldn't abandon him now.

He had never been so cold and
wet, and dark was fast approaching.

#Inktober
Day 22: the rain had cleared,

and a strange glow was coming from behind
their shelter.

They ran out and saw a shadowy form waving at them from a
boat.

"Our rescue has arrived!" Shouted Bun-Bun the Tramp, and he began
hopping

up and down, gesturing frantically for the boat to come near.

Porcupine Hobo began calling too,

though he had no idea about the
identity of the shadow.

#Inktober
Day 23: As the shadowy figure on the boat drew closer,

Bun-Bun the
Tramp exclaimed, "Ha! I knew it!

It's Cubby the Drifter come to save
us!"

He explained to Porcupine Hobo that Cubby was that rollerskating
bear

who was his Hobo-ing Mentor. Cubby called out, "Ahoy, hoy! Saw my
old tophat

stuck amongst the reeds upriver a bit, and knew you couldn't
be far. Climb aboard!"

And so they did.

#Inktober
Day 24: After paddling down the river aways,

the animals steered the
boat into the reeds,

following Cubby the Drifter's instructions.

"Where
are we going?" Porcupine Hobo inquired.

Cubby had a mysterious smile in
his face.

"Just trust me," he said.

Bun-Bun the Tramp nodded in
assurance,

so Porcupine Hobo tried not to worry.

#Inktober
Day 25: Cubby The Drifter leads Bun-Bun The Tramp

and Porcupine Hobo
off the boat and onto a tree-lined path.

"Follow me close. It's awfully
dark out here..." Cubby called.

#Inktober
Day 26: As they approached a bend in the forest path,

Cubby the Drifter
gestured them on.

When Bun-Bun the Tramp turned the corner,

he let out a
whoop and ran towards...whatever it was.

Porcupine Hobo cautiously
poked his head around a tree.

He couldn't believe his eyes.

#Inktober
Day 27: colored lights twinkled, the smell of stews wafted in the air.

Porcupine Hobo fairly floated down the small hill and under the banner
of "Hobo Haven."

Thursday, October 23, 2014

See that big blue "Boost Post" button? That's why. I don't have anything new to add to the chorus of voices decrying this "feature," but I did experiment with Boosting a Post, and $20 and 5,000 reaches later, I had no new likes on the page, and not a single one of the people reached actually clicked the link. Thanks, but no thanks.

The only reason the above screenshotted post had reached 83 people is simply because it's been the most recent post on that page for so long.

Yet, I hesitate to flip the kill switch on the page. After all, when I get to a place in my career where I would actually need a fan page (I'm presumptuous, heh heh), it will be awfully convenient not to have to start from zero likes all over again. For now though, the Fan Page is a cobwebby, ineffective time suck, and I find using my personal page to share my art is much more gratifying.

Speaking of time suck...

...you know this is coming...

...as much as I appreciate the three loyal followers of my blog (I really do!), are writing the updates that are probably kinda boring to anyone who is not invested in my career development really the best use of my time? I felt that the blog was an important thing to have online for potential agents to read so that they could see I wasn't crazy, but now I have an agent. (yay!) I'm not sure how far an editor is going to feel compelled to dig now that I have someone on the inside to vouch for me.

I've considered, now that the landing page of my website doesn't connect to blogspot at all anymore, completely removing the blog, and just letting my art and my submissions speak for themselves.

It's a conundrum!

But again, I hesitate to do anything permanent. Does this mean I'm a webpage hoarder? Are they going to have to call up that reality show Hoarders and clean out my web browser with a shovel? What if I want this blog up at some point, no matter how embarrassing the years-old entries are to me now? It shows my trajectory, my improvement, my dedication to the craft.

It's not like I would delete it forever, it just would no longer be available for public consumption.

At some point, if I'm lucky, that blog page on my new website will be used for announcing book launches, signings, and tour dates, and there won't be room for all of this personal angst anymore.

Until I get to that point, though, I guess I'll keep updating the blog.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

“The definition of
crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different
result.”

I don't know who said it, but that quote was circling around and around in my head these
last few months as I once again wound myself up to take on a new picture book
project and see it through to the querying phase.

While I was busy bellyaching about the querying process over
the years, quite a number of my peers have noted that they finally got signed
just when they were ready to give up and quit trying. But I couldn’t even think
about giving up…I had no answers as to what I would do if I did quit – making
books and art is all I want to do! But, being the practical semi-New Ager that
I am, I figured intentions were
important: so I began fibbing to the universe, threatening to give up and move
to a commune. I even made a Pinterest board called “Life on the Commune.” I was
hoping that my research into better living with mason jars was enough to sway
the cosmos in my favor, because I didn’t really picture myself becoming one
with the goats.

And maybe this intention
intervention worked, because, after what felt like quite a number of eons,
I finally submitted to the right place at the right time. It was quite
serendipitous. Because who knows why it happened now after five years of being
skunked? (But really, we all know it had to have been thanks to that Pinterest
board…right?)

Imaginary magical Pinterest board juju or not, the facts
are: I got my agent’s interest when she was forwarded the dummy I had just
begun querying to agents. Just begun, as in that very week. I definitely
believe my “cutthroat” (see previous blogpost) strategy of networking really
made the difference there.

Before the (at the time potential) agent and I spoke on the
phone, I emailed her the two other picture book dummies that I had completed in
the last year. Since agents can either sign you on a project-by-project basis
or on your potential career as a whole, I figured showing her that I wasn’t a
one-book wonder could lead to an offer of career representation – which is what
I wanted. I was seeding the clouds.

And BOOM.

The agent and I clicked on the phone, and it was a whirlwind
from there. I let all the other agents I was out with know I had an offer, and
gave them a short window of opportunity to respond, but really, I already knew.
Two days later, I accepted her offer of representation.

And all of the sudden, a whole chunk of my daily routine –
researching agents in order to personalize my query letters – was no longer
relevant. It was a very strange feeling, and a good one. The absence of an
onerous duty. I could finally focus on my art, and not scrounging around trying
to get someone to pay attention to me, looking for connections that weren’t
there, etc.

Plucked from obscurity, that’s how it feels.

While I am VERY aware that even with an agent, there’s no guarantee
that I’ll be published, I am SURE that, just by having a reputable agent, I am
a trillion times closer to being published. It’s like I finally got to the top
of the first, very tall mountain, and while there are a whole bunch of mountains
in the range, at least I’m up there and working my way across the Pacific Crest Trail
or whatever, and not back at sea level just dreaming about hiking.

Wow. Talk about an overextended metaphor.

Long story short, I am now represented by Lara Perkins, of the
Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

This was my fifth year at the conference, and I’ll admit, I
was getting frustrated at the lack of forward momentum. While I wanted to get
the most out of the opportunity, I decided ahead of time to prioritize giving
myself enough time to rest and spend time with my friends. Otherwise, I’d once
again be so exhausted by the end of the weekend that I’d need to be a hermit
for the next few weeks just to recover. Not overextending myself meant choosing
fewer opportunities to make contact with agents and editors, so the onus was to
work them more effectively. Which meant…networking. Schmoozing. Which always
has felt gross to me. It’s not like I did something amoral – it’s just
business! – but I always felt weird developing and using connections. Maybe it
was a byproduct of growing up in LA, amongst a hive of insincere people
namedropping and using others as stepping stones.

It was time to reek of desperation. It was time to swallow
what remained of my pride in one big gulp.

While I had joked on Twitter about printing my dummy on
toilet paper and handing it under a bathroom stall to an editor, I didn’t go
that far. But I did take a risk. I got cheeky. When I saw that I had my
manuscript consultation with Steven Malk, (thank you, SCBWI angels!) I took a deep
breath and jumped…

It all felt slightly inappropriate on my part, or at least
presumptuous, but getting paired up with Steven Malk was kind of like getting
an interview with admissions at an Ivy League School, and I couldn’t squander
it by being chicken. Soooo…instead of just going over the manuscript I
submitted, I got out all my dummies and my portfolio, and I had him look at
everything during those 20 minutes. Check and check. All was proceeding
smoothly. I had one last step…I asked him which agent(s) he thought would be a
good fit for me.

To me, this felt really scary and forward. But I had taken my
very first children’s book class six long years ago, and for the past five, worked on my craft
full-time, so I was absolutely not a dilettante. Everyone around me was
scratching their heads over why I didn’t have an agent yet. I knew – KNEW –
that all it took was one yes, and all those years of contorting myself into a box
that people could understand would be over. And I knew Steven Malk’s opinion
carried a lot of weight with agents and editors. He is known for spotting value
in work that is different, and using his name would get people’s attention. If
he understood me, others would make an effort to understand.

And, yes, I knew if all went well, the best realistic outcome
would have been the ability to use the kind of gross, self-aggrandizing name-dropping
stuff that I usually hate:

“Steven Malk said you’d be a good fit for me.”

Maybe you’re thinking, What’s
the big deal about that?

I don’t have an answer. It just feels gross to me. It feels
like not getting chosen by virtue of my artistic merit, but through campaigning
for myself. But was that a bad thing? Was I just making things harder for
myself by resisting it? After all, I would be stating a fact. It’s not like he
was saying it because he owed me something. It wasn’t a lie. After all, I had
paid my dues! I AM a good artist! If this could get me in front of the right
eyeballs, I had to do what was best for my career.

So I had to do it. And with that decided, the rest would all
depend on my delivery of that heaven-sent sentence, “Steven Malk said…”

If it worked, the hell of querying would be over. I didn’t
have much to lose besides my pride at this point. So, that was it. I risked
sounding like a total jackass and jumped off a cliff . . .

. . . and . . .

. . . luckily, I didn’t meet a bloody end smashed on some
rocks at the bottom of said cliff.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Quick recap: Around the end of March, my friend from business school contacted me about creating a series of “stickers” for the online messaging app, LINE. As he explained to me, LINE is a powerful communication tool which works like What’s App meets Facebook Messaging meets Skype. The app was hugely popular globally, with almost 500 million users.

And I’d never heard of it.

See, most of those half a billion users are in Asia. Great! I thought – I’m huge in Asia, according to my website’s Google stats. (P.S. That’s a joke. I’m also due to inherit the estate of a Nigerian prince, right?)

Anyway, the folks at LINE were opening up the market for freelance illustrators to augment the shop’s selections. It’s an interesting pricing model: premium prices for “namebrand” stickers (trademarked), a second tier for those offered by LINE, and then discounted pricing for the audience-created product. It reminds me of self-publishing, too, as very quickly it becomes clear that you need a platform to really move any of your product before it gets buried by the competition.

So at the end of the second day the stickers were available, after my partner and I informed the social media world of our appearance on the scene, my HOOTS! sticker set was rated #23 most popular out of almost 5,000 (at the time) audience created sticker sets. I had convinced my closest friends to download the LINE app so I could at least send the stickers to them, and they, of course, nice as they are, bought the set themselves (it was only 99 cents!) But that only accounted for 8 or so sales! Number 23?!?

I thought I was an international sensation.

But after my meteoric rise to the Top 25, I plummeted hard, disappearing into obscurity within a week. Moral of the story? I guess when you’re no longer on the “new” page, you fade into the masses. And though I’d spent a month working on the things, I definitely wasn’t going to get a good return on my investment.

The good news is, this was like a beta run of what would happen if I self-published a book. I’d get a bunch of my friends to buy it, and it would artificially inflate the rankings enough to show up on stranger’s radars, they’d buy it, and then it would fade away as soon as the rankings slipped. I've always asserted that self-publishing isn't the route for me, and this experiment confirmed that.

But then again...

I only pimped it out that very first day, and haven’t mentioned it since. I feel like it would be annoying if I did, since no one I know had even heard of the app before I started talking about it, (Ah, the hipster life, amirite?), so I’d have to convince them to download the app first. And I don’t want to become a shill for an app that’s not mine! I gave my one pitch, and I feel like that should be it.

Now, if it were something like What’s App, I’m sure I would pimp it a whole lot more, since people in my extended social circle already use it. But still, people besides me would have to start talking it up, no matter was “it” is, in order for there to be sustained sales. There would have to be something new to say about it to merit blasting to my entire network again.

It’s not like I could post reviews or do a blog tour to sell my stickers on an app, so maybe the experiences are not as similar as I originally thought. And maybe I would have a better result with something I self-published. Maybe. But what it does boil down to is visibility. It seems obvious, but this was a good reminder. I need eyeballs to see my product if I want those eyeballs’ wallets to open. :)

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Since a month of toil is never enough, after a month of
working on the owl LINE Stamps, (now called Stickers, for the US Market, I
suppose), I then started messing around with finding a new character, and
deciding on a beaver.

He was so cute, I decided, “Hey, why don’t I draw 40 of
him, and use 'doing an in-depth character study' as an excuse and come up with a picture book
about it?” You know I can rarely do things for less than two rationalized
“reasons.”

Drawing 40 beavers was fun! Even
though it took me forever. (I was going through a lot of personal drama with
multiple pet death and stuff, so it took me longer than it should have). Then
it took me a month to color them. But don’t get me wrong – in the meantime, I
was writing and revising a beaver-based picture book. It evolved from something
really quite terrible to something that got the high praise that it “makes
sense and could work.” High praise, indeed! Well, that was the second draft.
The first draft was a nightmare of Julia psychoses. (I told you, I was going
through personal drama).Anyway, a few
drafts later, I was ready to thumbnail the story (okay, I lie, I thumbnailed
from the first draft on – it helps!), and then sketch out a first draft of the
dummy. Gotta have a dummy for the big SCBWI conference in August!